


my heart's an autoclave

by priestkink



Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Abuse, Fantasizing, Father Figures, Gangs, Gen, Growing Up, M/M, Murder, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Psychological Trauma, Western, mlm author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-26 23:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18727312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/priestkink/pseuds/priestkink
Summary: Nobody can trust a dog once it’s turned on its own people. That’s just how it is. You’re born of a jackal, boy. You’ll never be more than that.





	my heart's an autoclave

**Author's Note:**

> as a small warning, there are mentions of a minor fantasizing non-explicitly about his father figure in this.
> 
> for some context, sterling developed intermittent explosive disorder and epilepsy at a young age. an old west setting is not kind to him for it.

_ This is what you are, to them, and what you always will be. _ _   
_

The blood is already dry and flaking under his nails as he looks down at his feet. The body of a man with his head bashed in -  _ Jack _ , his mind foggily supplies - is laid out in a crumpled heap in front of him, blood still thick and spilling from his skull. Sterling, for a second, isn’t sure if it’s ever going to stop. The spade in his hands suddenly feels like it’s burning red-hot against his palm and he drops it with a grimace, a low hiss escaping between his clenched teeth.

He’s fourteen, and this is the first time he wonders if his father is really right.

_ You’re no son of mine. _

He looks for Asa, first, as the sun dips low toward the horizon and paints the sky in yellows and oranges, and Sterling can’t bear to look at it when it makes something sharp moves in his chest like shrapnel shifting loose. There’s still blood on him, on his hands and his clothes and probably his face, too, but he’s running on fumes by the time he finds Asa, walking toward the same shed where he had -

Bile rises in his throat but he shakes off the images, the flashes of matted fur and flashing teeth and more blood, so much more than this, and the barrel of a smoking gun burning him worse than the spade did -

“Asa,” he says, voice so much steadier than he feels. It sounds distant, and everything feels far away, out of reach. Faint and muffled, like he’s hearing a conversation from another room. “I need help.”

And Asa, bless him, betrays nothing in his expression when he looks Sterling over, just clicks his tongue and leans his weight onto the shovel he was about to put away. The blood rushing in Sterling’s veins pounds loud and violent in his ears, so loud he can barely hear himself talk, when he realizes Asa is watching him expectantly, waiting for more information.

His father is going to kill him.

He wonders if that’s an exaggeration, anymore.

There was a time when it almost hadn’t been, but, well. He pushes the thought away, one more time.

“Jack is dead,” he says around the lump forming thick and painful in his throat, and this time his voice wavers and cracks and Asa finally looks upset, but it only lasts a second before his expression is schooled back into something blank and closed off. Right. Jack was his friend. Not just another farmhand. Something wrong and nasty and out of place spikes in him, but he swallows around it.

“Show me,” is all Asa says and suddenly he’s in Sterling’s space, reaching to put a hand on his shoulder, and the motion is so familiar but Sterling wrenches away like he might crumble under the weight of Asa’s touch. (He wants it, always wants it, wants  _ more _ , but he doesn’t deserve it. Not now, and he probably never did, but he can’t stop himself from  _ wanting _ , only ever stopped himself from asking.)

He feels like he’s going to throw up, feels the bile burning its way up his throat again.

So he turns away, shoulders stiff, walks Asa back to the length of broken fence he was supposed to be fixing for his father before Jack had pissed him off, and Asa goes deafeningly silent. He doesn’t try to touch Sterling again, and Sterling tries not to feel guilty.

_ You’re nothing but a rabid dog. Dangerous. Unpredictable. Someone will have to put you down, eventually. You can’t fight it. _

The body is still there, flies already collecting around it, and Sterling feels rubbed raw the entire time Asa helps him carry it down to the river, the entire time they clean up the mess of blood left in the dirt. They burn his clothing, too stained to salvage, and Asa scrubs Sterling clean, scrubs him red until his skin’s nearly bleeding and Sterling is still and silent as the - well.

By the time they’re done and the river has swept Jack’s body down and away from the property, Sterling is pale and shaking and the taste of copper is flooding his mouth.

Asa holds him down through a seizure, keeps him pinned while he convulses in the dirt, and neither of them talk in the aftermath. Sterling brushes his touch off again when he comes to, something heavy and firm settling at the pit of his stomach, weighing him down, and they go their separate ways. But Asa is just so fucking  _ tender _ with him and he can’t let himself have that.

The sky is dark and heavy with clouds and they have to pick their way carefully back to the cabins in silence.

He lays in bed and feels sick and wrong and ugly for it when all he can think about is how much he wants to climb into Asa’s bed. He just doesn’t want to be alone, right now, he tries to tell himself, tries to reason it’s only the comfort of a body next to him that he wants. But that’s not really it, and deep down he knows it’s not that simple when he’s spent so much time in bed like this, staring up at the ceiling and imagining Asa’s hands, his lips, his weight on him in the dark of the room. He doesn’t sleep.

Sterling doesn’t look anyone in the eye the next day, but the only one who notices or cares is Asa, who respectfully keeps his distance. Sterling’s chest aches over Asa’s absence, but he doesn’t blame him.

_ Nobody can trust a dog once it’s turned on its own people. That’s just how it is. You’re born of a jackal, boy. You’ll never be more than that. _

* * *

 

Sterling is fifteen when he runs away.

He’s fifteen when he finally turns on his father for beating his mother, when he throws him to the floor and cracks his skull open like it’s nothing and nearly loses himself to the blinding rage before she’s sobbing at his feet and begging for him to stop, to get out, to have some kind of mercy.

Sterling isn’t sure he’s capable of mercy, anymore, doesn’t know if he ever really was.

His sisters watch, horrified, the same trio of stunned faces they’d had the times that he’d burned their clothes or broken drinking glasses or thrown furniture. He’s seen red so many times that the incidents all blend together at this point, and he hates himself every time he’s reminded how much his own family is terrified of him.

He can only imagine how relieved they must have looked in comparison when his father had pointed a gun at the back of his head. (And then the disappointment, when he had noticed them walking over and lowered his arm, snarled at Sterling to clean up his mess and get back to work. It wasn’t mercy. Sterling knows he was just lucky.)

He’s fifteen when the fear in his mother’s eyes every time she looks at him finally becomes too much for him to bear, and he leaves his father bleeding on the wood floor and doesn’t look back, even when he hisses out, “I ever see you again and I’ll shoot you dead,” around the wet sounds of blood collecting in his mouth.

He can only hope.

Sterling leaves on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back, doesn’t stop until he reaches town and the sun high overhead has him dizzy and sweat-soaked and bordering on a seizure.

He doesn’t see his father again for years but he sees his sisters’ faces pass by in the market crowd, sometimes, hears the locals gossiping about his parents. And their bastard son, run off - with a local gang, some say, or some girl he’d gotten pregnant, or god forbid, a boy he’d been caught with. An embarrassment, that one, wasn’t he?

If only they knew the truth.

One face he doesn’t expect to see again is Asa, moved on from his work for almost a year now. Something twists in his gut and he feels the heartbreak all over again, after a year of trying to forget it.

* * *

 

Roscoe lays at the edge of the bed, fur warm and soft under his hands, his body a steady, grounding weight beside him. Sterling sits up and scratches behind his ears, giggles when the mutt sniffs and shifts his head around to press his cold, wet nose to the palm of Sterling’s hand. He cards his finger through the mutt’s fur and hums. Morning sunlight streams in from the window and bathes the room in a soft yellow glow, and Sterling feels almost normal.

“You up for helpin’ me today or bein’ lazy, huh?” he asks, softly, and Roscoe tilts his head. Sterling mimics the motion and Roscoe does it again, peering up at him with clear brown eyes. “I’m goin’ to the market later. Sellin’ those ki-yote pelts I made. Asa showed me how. Told me I’m better’n him for only shootin’ once in my life,” he continues, sounding proud of himself, as if Roscoe would understand him. (And sometimes, Sterling swears he does, swears up and down that Roscoe understands his every word. He’s too smart not to.)

Sterling is six years old the first time he holds a gun, seven when Asa starts working on the farm, nine when Asa finally teaches him how to shoot. In the same week he makes his first two kills shooting at coyotes from a hundred feet back, and then Asa teaches him how to skin them to sell. It’s his proudest moment, even if his father looks at him strangely when he boasts about how good of a shot he is.

He’s fourteen when it finally clicks why his father had looked at him that way, when he takes Sterling out to the shed and opens the door and Roscoe, who had been missing for almost a week, tumbles out, snarling and snapping at nothing and stumbling like he’s confused and weak and dying.

He’s fourteen, only fourteen years old when his father pushes a gun in his hands and tells him to shoot, tells him that rabid dogs are too far gone and that this is what Sterling, with his uncontrollable temper and unpredictable mood swings, with his hatred and anger and ugliness, will amount to in the end. He’s fourteen when he pulls the trigger, but he feels like he’s five when he drops the gun, cradles Roscoe’s body, and breaks down sobbing, shaking, begging in the dirt.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only thing that he can get out, and he hiccups it painfully and pathetically. “I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.”

His father’s voice is distant and in his head and right next to him, all at once. Then he’s quiet.

He hears the click before he feels the gun pressed to the back of his head, but he doesn’t look up until he hears the trio of gasps from his sisters.

Then the gun is gone, and his father is saying, “Go back inside,” and it sounds miles away, even when he’s kneeling on the other side of Roscoe’s body and snarling through gritted teeth, “You, clean up your mess. And get back to work. I want those fences fixed by the end of the week. Do you understand me?”

He’s fourteen, and he doesn’t, and it isn’t for another three days that he finally starts to.

* * *

 

“Yer lyin’, Asa,” Sterling says, and the gap of his two missing teeth has him lisping around the ‘s’ enough to make Hiram laugh. He pouts and huffs and crosses his arms when he continues, “You ain’t no govermint spy.”

“ _ Government _ , no,” Hiram says with a grin, wide and straight-toothed and a little bit mischievous. He’s bent down on one knee so they’re face to face, and Hiram’s waggling a finger at Sterling, who goes cross-eyed for a moment watching it. “It ain’t so high up as that, kid.”

“But yer not old!” Sterling insists, eyes wide and bright and Hiram can’t help but laugh at how innocent and earnest the kid is. There’s a pause where he raises his eyebrow and Sterling adds, unsurely, questioning: “Yer  _ not _ , right?”

“I’m eighteen,” Hiram confirms with a solemn nod, ten years Sterling’s senior but by no means  _ old _ , and Sterling seems satisfied with that answer after considering it for a moment. Hiram leans in close, throws an arm around Sterling like he’s divulging top secret information. “Can you keep a secret?”

Sterling nods before Hiram can even finish the question, interest obviously piqued.

“I’m spyin’ on yer dear old dad, kid. Rumor has it he’s embezzlin’ money, violatin’ some big civil laws,” Hiram says with mock sobriety, knowing Sterling won’t understand. He knows the kid, knows if he hears big words he can’t make sense of then he’ll accept the answers easily, will figure that if someone sounds smart then they must know what they’re talking about.

Lord, he doesn’t miss being that young and impressionable.

“So you ain’t really workin’ the farm then, Asa?” Sterling asks and, god, he’s puppy-tilting his head the same way Roscoe does - he really does spend more time with that mutt than he does anyone else.

“No,” Hiram confirms, and, well - it’s the truth, but he loves messing with Sterling and he knows nobody will believe the kid if he tries to tattle on him. “Just pretendin’. Well, it’s more like a cover-up.”

Sterling nods like he understands, but it’s obvious he doesn’t - Hiram sometimes swears he can  _ see _ the words going in one ear and coming straight out the other side.

Hiram’s first mistake is here, though, in assuming Sterling’s memory is as short as his attention span. Neither of them ever talk about the exchange again but it’s obvious in the way Sterling smiles knowingly whenever he calls him “Asa” that he never forgot until he grew out of the “secret” like other kids grew out of Santa Claus. For a long time, Hiram can tell the “if that’s even your real name” joke is at the tip of his tongue until it isn’t anymore, and, well. Missed opportunities and unappreciated irony.

* * *

 

For what it’s worth, Asa doesn’t question why Sterling ran away, doesn’t even seem to judge him on whatever assumptions he’s made, conclusions he’s drawn, when they see each other in town again.

He’s good to Sterling, in a way. Or as good as he can be, at least.

Sterling feels like he doesn’t even deserve that much.

“So,” he says, one day, drawing out the ‘o’ in an attempt to sound casual. But he’s high-strung and tense and he can’t hide that, not really, not from Asa. He never could. “You weren’t... Kiddin’. ‘Bout the spy thing.”

He means for it to be a question, but it comes out as a statement, finite and undeniable. Asa doesn’t look at him, just picks a twig up off the ground and pokes at the campfire they’d set up far enough from town for some real privacy. Sterling, for the life of him, cannot feel the heat. He’s cold inside and out, but he’s not sure if that scares him, anymore.

“No, guess not,” Asa says with an evenness that’s not present on his face. The fire casts harsh shadows across him that make him look ten, twenty years older. For once Sterling can read him easily, sees in the lines of his forehead and the way his brows are drawn up close and the way he’s been chewing his lip raw that he’s upset.

(He still wants to kiss him, he realizes, but the thought is so quiet, so resigned that he barely notices it.)

Sterling waits for him to elaborate, but he never does, so he pushes.

“Was it really my old man you were keepin’ tabs on?”

Asa still won’t look at him. “No. Was just layin’ low for a few years. Gang was scattered to the winds after we got into some trouble here, but I was young enough nobody knew my face yet. Yer father didn’t do nothin’ to nobody.”

_ Bullshit _ , Sterling wants to say.  _ He did everything to me _ . He schools himself into a practiced blankness against the anger boiling hot under his skin, crawling like insects looking for a way out. He wants to yell and cry and stomp his feet over the unfairness of it all, but he’s too old for that now, has been too old for that since his father beat it out of him at six years old.

Well. The crying stopped, at least. The tantrums just turned angry, violent.

“Kid,” Asa says suddenly, and Sterling looks up from the fire, releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Asa’s staring at him with these dark, intense eyes for just a moment before he looks back down, averts his gaze like a guilty dog. Sterling wants to reach out and touch him, wants to crawl into his lap and kiss him until they’re both too dizzy on the rush of it to remember why Asa made that face in the first place.

“My name ain’t Asa. But you figured as much, didn’t you?” he continued and shrugs, more to himself than to Sterling, then adds through an exhale, “It’s Hiram.”

There’s a long, drawn out pause that hangs heavy between the two of them. Sterling doesn’t respond, and Asa - Hiram - stands up to put out the fire for the night.

Sterling does his best to resist crawling into the same tent. He doesn’t sleep.

* * *

 

Sterling is seventeen when he tries to join Hiram’s gang. He’s seventeen when Hiram tells him no, and again when Sterling insists that he wants to, has to, and again when Sterling won’t shut up about it until Hiram finally explodes on him that he won’t - can’t - let Sterling lose himself anymore than he already has.

_ Yer just a fuckin’ kid. _

_ No, I ain’t. Never was. _

He’s twenty-one when he makes deputy, has been keeping his head down like Hiram told him to for four years now, but it’s not until he’s twenty-five when people finally start to respect him. He puts up a front and he does what he’s told and he’s good at his job in ways that neither he nor Hiram expect, but people are finally looking him in the eye and not down at the dirt and blood always stuck under his nails.

He’s twenty-six when two of his sisters move across the country, twenty-six when he sees his father again at town hall meetings and they both manage to keep the peace long enough so that nobody will suspect a thing. His skin crawls and he’s so tense it makes his body ache down to the bone, but he does it. He keeps his head down and behaved himself and just thinks about seeing Hiram for drinks in the evenings. (Thinks about the shape of his lips and the way his adam’s apple bobs when he takes a shot and the stubble on his chin and how it would feel against his neck or his thighs and he wants to touch, but he never does. But he’s sure Hiram knows, by now, that he wants to.)

He’s twenty-nine when he’s elected sheriff but only thirty when his sister is murdered and he loses the last person from his old life who’d shown him any shred of kindness, in the moments the other two hadn’t been around to influence her.

Well. He still had Hiram, didn’t he?

No. Asa left him. Hiram’s not Asa, he never was. (He tells himself this and he never believes it.)

Sterling snaps, finally, when the law fails and his sister’s murderer walks free.

He’s still thirty when he kills someone again, and the first time feels like lifetimes ago but he’s still the same person he was back then. Unpredictable, and violent, ready to turn at any moment.

Hiram breaks him out of his jail cell the same night they catch him. He’s thirty when he’s on the run, too, thirty when Hiram finally agrees that he’s made for gang life.

He’s thirty-five when he shoots the old leader in the head and takes over the gang and all Hiram can do is watch.

Hiram is forty-five when Sterling crawls into his tent the first time and climbs over him while he’s only half awake and Sterling’s breath smells like whiskey when it ghosts over his cheek. Hiram shocks them both when Sterling hesitates, though, closes the gap and kisses him and they lose the night like that.

* * *

 

Sterling is forty when he meets Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt does what Hiram never could.


End file.
